Here is an aeroplane window. Here is a nocturnal airfield. Here is my dry tongue, and the after-taste of medicine. Here is a pillow, fallen on my lap. "You were groaning in your sleep like I-Don't-Know-What!" Jean is strapped in beside me. We must be departing, not arriving. "Moaning, snoring, drooling ... I had half a mind to disavow all knowledge of you, and ask for a new seat."

"I was just ..." My dream skates off. Jean was in it, blundering towards the lip of the quarry on the Malvern Hills. A blizzard had muffled my warning shouts. "I was just resting my eyes."

My wife says, "Whatever."

"That expression does not suit a woman of your years."

Jean does her hippopotamus snort. "Counted the candles on your cake lately, Graham Nixon?" If there is a need to evacuate the aircraft, a floor-mounted lighting system will guide you to the nearest exit. Please be aware that this may be behind you. Our exit is three rows in front. For every passenger, I notice, there must be three or four unoccupied seats. If there is a change in cabin pressure, an oxygen mask will automatically fall from the overhead lockers. An air hostess demonstrates "in synch" with the announcement. Her hair is honey-brown and she is ageless. As I give her safety demonstration the attention it deserves, my memory flips over a picture of Rebecca Piper. That girl was an accident waiting to happen, so Logic assures me, as it has done hundreds of times before. Fit the mask to your face, and pull on the tabs to release the flow of oxygen. Be sure to fit your own mask before assisting children or old people.

Did I hear that correctly? "'Old people'?"

"Oh, don't start."

"This is not me 'starting', Jean! This is blatant ageism!"

"Do I detect another Mr Disgusted letter coming on?"

"Better Mr Disgusted than Mrs Lie-Down-And-Be-Trampled-On - and Yes, since you ask - some Managing Director somewhere is in for a very frank missive indeed."

"'Managing Directors' became 'Chief Executives' in the early 90s."

"Aren't we just 'Ahead of the Curve'?"

Jean picks up the in-flight magazine. I get my notebook from my jacket pocket to draft my letter. However, I soon run into difficulties. What airline are we flying? Where are we going? What airport is this? In fact, I have no recollections of today whatsoever, prior to waking up just now. I check my pockets for ticket stubs or boarding passes, but recover only a button off a blazer. Once outside the aircraft pull on the tabs to inflate the life-jacket. Use the attached tube to top up the air, as required. The jacket is fitted with a light and whistle for attracting attention. These "memory blanks" no longer cause me undue panic. If the salient facts don't catch up in their own time, enough of the "old grey matter" remains to glean the necessary clues. No, I shan't ask Jean. Doing so would worry her, and make a decrepit dodderer of me. In point of fact, I feel rather well - maybe not the pink of health, but well out of the sickly khaki.

Our aeroplane begins its taxi to the runway.

I replace my notebook before Jean notices my lack of progress, and extract the laminated Safety Information card from the seat pocket in front of me. This I now set about committing to memory. "Abuse it or lose it", as Dr Chester White, who is Caribbean and black, is fond of saying, along with his deadpan jokes about sacrificial roosters. I shall send him a postcard when we get there. "The exit chutes inflate automatically when the exits are opened," I inform Jean. "Then they detach, to serve as life-rafts."

"That will be a hoot."

I'd better stay on board, to herd the Great British Public out, and ensure the women remove their pointed heels. As I used to say at school assembly on the morning of the fire drill, what stands between an emergency and a disaster is one man who keeps his head.

Printed atop the safety card is my first clue to what we are doing here. Our airline company's name is "Air Dénouement". Did any so-called "focus-group" ever dream up a sillier moniker? Now in the days of one-airline-one-country, you knew where you were. British Airways. Air Italia. Singapore Airlines. Nowadays this aviation lark is a "free-for-all". Bingo Airlines. Scratch'n'Sniff Skybus. I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not Airways. Air Denouément, if you please! Could it be a French set-up, then, I wonder? Might we be flying to Paris, on a sort of "second honeymoon"? I probe Jean. "I wonder if I should have brought a thicker coat ..."

"Oh, you packed for four seasons. More than four. You packed for eight seasons." My wife turns her page. "As per usual."

"Look who it isn't!" Jean is jerking her thumb at a rotund gentleman in the aisle seats next to us. "Just look who it isn't!"

Sitting there is a very famous television comedian, and actor. We watched his programmes even when Ruth was little. He's not one of these "groundbreaking" transsexual merchants who swear and mock the handicapped. He's a family comedian. Oh, what is the man's name? His giant hands are busy shuffling a pack of cards, over and over. Is he a nervous flier? I hiss at my gawping wife, "You're behaving like a 'fan'."

"But I am! He won't mind one little autograph - he does Comic Relief every year. Get one for Ruth while you're at it."

"You molest him, if you must. But I shan't be defending your honour if he tells you where to get off."

I miss whatever twaddle my wife spouts back, because my attention is hijacked by a bearded fundamentalist-looking-type sitting in the window seat directly across from us, beyond the famous comedian. Not only his holy beard and general hawkishness set the alarm bells ringing, but his lips too. They are moving in silent prayer. Now, "racist" was one thing I was never called, not even by that Ear-studded Hobbit from Ofsted who had clearly never done a day's "coal-face" teaching in his life. Black, yellow, red, Bangladeshi, Chinese or Martian, everyone got the same treatment in my school. My cane was as colour-blind as it was fair-minded. But ever since "9/11" - which ought to be "11/9" in point of fact - and that Open University for Jihadists better known as "Iraq" opened up, we all have a duty to be vigilant. The bearded fundamentalist has a shaven colleague, too, occupying the seat behind. He is reading a book. Normally that is a favourable sign, but this book has that blank plasticky cover universally favoured by publishers of the Word of God. We must be flying out of Birmingham, then. Makes sense. Birmingham is Worcestershire's closest airport, and well known for its racial diversity.

"Graham?" Jean tugs my sleeve. "Anyone home?"

"Thinking about our trip, dear."

Someone needs to watch that pair like a hawk.

Our aeroplane waits at the foot of the runway. The blue, red and green ground-lights remind me of some long-lost boyhood dominoes. Where do all these relics end up, I wonder? The engines change pitch from a lazy drone to a roar, the aeroplane rattles, and the captain releases the hand-brake. A modern terminal building zooms by in the distance. The airport name eludes me. Our aeroplane's nose lifts, our stern wheel thumps and Jean pats my hand. I pat hers back. Lyme Regis, I'd thought, was to be our final holiday. Now look at us, flying off to foreign parts. If only I could remember which foreign parts. My memory is like a certain type of teenager. The more one interrogates it, the sulkier it becomes. Below us, a large city sinks and rotates. Here is a gas-works. Here is a sports stadium. Here is a strung-out knot of car headlights which could be Spaghetti Junction. In point of fact, however, the city evoked for me is Captain Nemo's underwater haven from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Mr Lincoln, my own headmaster, awarded me a splendid edition of Jules Verne's masterpiece, for being the Most Diligent Boy of 1952.

"Pinch your nose," advises Jean the "Seasoned Traveller", "then try to breathe out through it. It adjusts your ears to the air-pressure." She must have read it in one of her women's magazines, but it works. Jean crows, "See?"

I award her the slightest nod.

The famous comedian is making cards emerge from the pack, as if plucked by invisible fingertips. Maybe he started his career as a magician.

The bearded fundamentalist has finished his prayers, but his jaw is clenching and unclenching. Next, I watch him do something that doesn't quite add up. He stands up, pulls down a respectable-looking bag from the overhead locker, rifles inside it for a few seconds, and then returns it, without removing a single item. Why would he do that?

The shaven fundamentalist has swapped his Holy Book for his "iPod". He might be listening to Coldplay or whoever is "Top of the Pops" this week. Equally, however, one of those "Preachers of Hate" could be injecting his brain with some toxic sermon.

Suddenly the man looks at me, straight in the eye.

As if he can hear my very thoughts.

The air hostess with the honey-brown bob approaches. Air hostesses are only flying waitresses, you know. That is what I told Rebecca Piper, thirty years ago, and not a day has passed when I did not ache to retract those words. An American would doubtless sue me for it, these days, for "Defaming my Dream", or some such. In my defence, one was never sure how serious Rebecca Piper was about anything. True, an air hostess still had a "halo of glamour" in the 1970s, but Rebecca Piper possessed a command of irony that no teenager has any business possessing.

The air hostess rests her arm on the back of Jean's chair. Her perfume leaves a ghostly trace. "Hi," she says to the passengers behind us, and although this greeting normally riles me, it suits the air hostess to an absolute "T". "You pressed the attendant button?"

Unlike Jean, I resist the impulse to turn around.

"Well." The passenger is Welsh. "This is my son, Tom."

"Hello, Tom."

"Er, hi." Tom sounds like a tenth or eleventh grader.

"Tom wants to join the RAF," the mother explains, "after his 'A'-levels. He's already had one interview, and it went very well, didn't it Tom? We've established that he has 20-20 vision. And we were wondering, if it's not too much trouble ..."

"You'd like to have a look at the cockpit?"

"That'd be just ..." replies the boy, "yeah, ... so terrific."

Children mumble and their sentences slouch so, nowadays.

"No promises, Tom, but I'll go and have a word with the captain."

The mother and son thank her, and off she goes.

I approve of Tom. An idiotic impulse seizes me, first to introduce myself to the mother as a retired headmaster, and then to tell Tom about my dad, who was an RAF pilot also named Tom, and also from Wales, and who saw active service in the war. Best not to, however, I decide. My father was shot down over Dresden before I was born, in point of fact.

Meanwhile, the shaven fundamentalist has unplugged himself from his "iPod". It occurs to me that he was listening in just now. If so, he'll know that security around the captain's cabin is less than rigid.

Jean says, "Just popping to the loo."

I very much wish she wouldn't, but what would I say?

The bearded fundamentalist watches Jean go, and murmurs into a Dictaphone. His expression is best described by the oxymoron "deranged calmness". Not long ago, the Six o'Clock News played the pre-recorded testament of a suicide bomber who wore that very expression. What distinguished him from any number of lads who see the world in dyed-black wrongness and bleached-white rightness was his appalling readiness for death. Where was that inner voice, who says Yes, but isn't there another side to this? or Hang on, why aren't my mentors urging their children to this glorious death? or If things had been a little different, might not I be you? That inner voice lay crushed under abject injustice; or else was slain in cold blood by intoxicated zealotry. Which is the more tragic, I cannot say.

The famous comedian is playing patience on his tray-table. Not very successfully, judging from his constant reshufflings and stoical sighs.

Without warning, the cabin lights dim.

All is as dark as the womb.

In my golden pond of lamplight, I examine Dénouement Sky Magazine. It is a sales brochure of "grooming products", executive cars, sunglasses, "Rolexes" and glossy guff. My surprise is extreme, then, to encounter first the portrait of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne; and second to see that the editors have reprinted one of his finest essays: That to Philosophize is to Learn How to Die. Forty years ago, as a philosophy undergraduate, I translated this very text from the sixteenth-century French. This must be some aerial equivalent of the commendable "Poems on the Underground" scheme. Here, I remember this passage: Caesar, to a jaded and broken-down soldier of his guard, who came to him in the street to ask his leave to be put to death, looking at his decrepit appearance, humorously replied, "You think, then, that you are alive?" Once upon a time, becoming a Montaigne scholar was my foremost ambition. Jean's father, however, swung my first appointment as schoolmaster, then Ruth was born, promotions followed, the grammar school went comprehensive, and one morning I awoke to find myself in charge of eighty teaching staff and nine hundred pupils. Here is the Cicero reference: Cicero says that philosophizing is nothing more than preparing for death. That is as much to say that study and contemplation in some sort withdraw our soul outside of us, and keep it occupied apart from the body, and this is a kind of resemblance to death; or perhaps, all the wisdom and reason in the world converge in one point, to teach us not to fear death.

Jean's little joke. Every 1st of January, I'd tell her, I'm going to start my Montaigne book this year. But school would kick off, some crisis or other would mug February, Easter sprung upon us, and before I knew it, the June exams would kick down the doors, and July marched off a new platoon of pupils, some to universities, some to fall through a "gap year", some to the Services, some to Tesco, one or two to Kidderminster Prison. Then September marched in the new recruits. The pupils stayed eternally young, whilst I grew steadily old, and never once did I find room for Michel Eyquem de Montaigne on this annual Merry-go-Round. Can it really be true that the more people's lives you acquire influence over, the less influence you have over your own?

Here comes my air hostess again.

"Sorry to keep you, Tom. A passenger in first class was feeling poorly. The captain wonders if you are free to join him?"

"Oh no it is not, Graham Nixon! You'd say, 'Oooh, such-and-such is very bright.' What's more: for years you took the Mickey out of anyone, including Ruth, who used the word 'age-ism'."

Did I? Since my first stroke, I have a morbid fear that people use my "memory blanks" to run rings around me. But were Jean to stoop so low, I'd be lost. "That was before those words gained wider currency."

"Who's to say 'lush' won't?"

The shaven fundamentalist stands up. He watches my air hostess, Tom and his mother walk towards the captain's cabin. Breaking into a trot, he follows them, on the parallel gangway, and my old headmaster's instinct tells me, loud and clear, It is about to begin. I unclip my seatbelt and push past Jean.

"What is it?" asks Jean. "Are you sick?"

Sick is exactly what I feel. "I'll be right back."

The shaven fundamentalist has been in the lavatory for a full quarter of an hour. I maintain my vigil from a vacant seat, having spun Jean a tale about Dr White "prepping" me about exercise and deep-vein thrombosis. My new medication is affecting my perception, very slightly, because the passengers appear to be growing sparser. Like my memory lapses, I do not fret over medicinal side-effects. They are the price to pay for freedom from debilitating pains; and, at this juncture, I have a mission to perform. The minutes pass, and pass, and pass. What's he up to in there? My relief that the cockpit wasn't stormed once again turns to anxiety. The lavatory door opens at last, but as the fundamentalist steps out, his bearded co-religionist steps up. The two make eye contact, and the words Cheers Mate and Hope I didn't keep you are exchanged, in Black Country accents. That may sound innocuous, but what code-words do not? The lavatory door is locked once again. It's well known how Terrorist A can leave a tube of Chemical X in an agreed-upon location, so that Terrorist B can mix it with Chemical Y. The resultant Chemical Z blows a hole in the fuselage at 20,000 feet. Once again, I try to recall the security arrangements back at the airport, but in vain. Waking up on this aeroplane with a pillow falling away is the first memory of the entire day.

Telling Jean is out of the question. She'll suggest I call Inspector Morse on the "Bat-phone". No, I must devise my own strategy. Whenever I caned a child, I sought to have the miscreant understand both the consequences of his misdemeanour and, if possible, its origins. Often, I was wasting my time, but now and then a light would switch on. The question here is this: How do you enlighten two men who are ready to blow up an aeroplane?

No, I'm wrong. Here is the question: How can we even communicate? We share the same physical space, but what of moral space? Peace is ensured by people co-habiting moral space, and war comes when walls and fences spring up across it. Within these fortified enclaves, meanings mutate. "Wanton Murder" in one means "Martyrdom" in the other. "Kidnapping" comes out as "Rendition" or "Fund-raising" or "Act of War". I talk of "Enlightenment": they see "Squalor of the Spirit". The labour of reunifying two moral spaces is Herculean, no, Protean. Meanings must be reconciled even before people.

The lavatory door opens.

I "play possum" as the bearded fundamentalist passes. Once the coast is clear, I enter the tiny cubicle and lock the door. Here is a rubbish bin. It contains one disposable toothbrush and a few paper towels. Here is a little cupboard. This contains three rolls of inferior lavatory paper. Here is a tissue box, containing tissues. The cubicle is a single moulded unit, with no spaces above the ceiling or behind the mirror. I can only conclude the bomb was not planted in the lavatory. The Graham Nixon in the mirror looks anxious, but otherwise well. That crazing of red veins in my eyes is cleared up, my beard is trimmed, though another effect of Dr White's medicine is to retard stubble-growth - I should need a shave at this time of day. Even my waterworks, when I use the lavatory, perform better than in many a moon. I wash my hands and straighten my tie. Then, when I try to leave, I discover that the door-bolt won't slide into the OPEN position. Too late, I understand: the terrorists knew I was on to them, so they lured me in here.

Here is abject panic.

"Here we go," the famous comedian apologises, a moment later. "What joker designed these doors, do you suppose, eh?"

"Atrocious," I gasp.

"You could've been pulling on your side, and I could've been pulling my side, like a right pair of flamin' twerps, until Kingdom Come."

I squeeze past, my pulse detonating my ear-drums. The incident is absurd, but so is sitting on well-grounded fears about terrorism for a second longer. Every hijacking in history must be preceded by an observant spectator smelling a rat, but who says nothing for fear of making an exhibition of himself. Here is my air hostess in the first-class cabin, kneeling with a male colleague by a woman passenger who looks somewhat "green around the gills". "Young lady," I address my air hostess, "might I have a discreet word?"

"Sir, would you give me just one moment?"

One whiff of hysteria from an elderly person, and his credibility is shredded. "Very well, but it is rather important."

"I'll be with you as soon as possible, Sir."

The male steward makes an announcement on the "intercom". "Ladies and gentleman, a passenger is feeling a little unwell. If we have a medical doctor on board, please identify yourself to the attendant." My air hostess walks down the aeroplane. The steward takes a glass of water to the poorly passenger, who would feel years younger simply by laying off the chocolate éclairs. I take a window seat and try to distract myself from thoughts of explosive devices. Far beneath us, moonlit clouds resemble a limitless ice-sheet. Here and there are holes, and through these dots of light are visible, very faint, as if observed through the lens of an inadequate telescope. Rebecca Piper's favoured misdemeanour was to purloin costly, useless items: metalwork tools, sporting equipment, and such like. Her charming mother, an opera singer living off divorce settlements, sat in my office agreeing with my every last word, but impressed upon her daughter not a single one, including my final warning. Things came to a head one afternoon just before Christmas, always a hazardous time in the school calendar. Rebecca Piper used a coat-hanger to break into my car. She removed a spare coat and hat, my briefcase and umbrella, and paraded around the corridors pretending to be Mr Nixon. The hysterical laughter accompanying her grand tour brought the lunch-time monitors running, and Rebecca Piper was confined to the Stationary Room while I devised her punishment. Eileen Lippetts, my head of English for many years, and Rebecca Piper's form tutor, warned me, Kid gloves, Graham. Nothing you can do to that kid could top what's already been done to her. I knew better, of course, and decided that public humiliation was a fitting sentence for an exhibitionist. At school assembly the following morning, I made Rebecca Piper stand up, in front of all nine hundred pupils, and recounted the previous day's events in my deadliest voice. I demanded to know if anyone felt like laughing now. The silence was gratifying. I asked Rebecca Piper, Do you want me to expel you? She replied, You can't do that! Sensing her imminent tears and my imminent victory, I assured her that Oh, Yes, I most certainly could. She replied, But how can you, Graham Nixon, when I already expelled myself. Rebecca Piper walked out into the dark Midlands winter. She had duped me. This was the exit she'd dreamed of.

"Now, Sir." My air hostess is back. "What can I do for you?"

"Ah." I must choose my words for maximum effect. "There are these two passengers." I take the precaution of checking that nobody can overhear us, and here, to my surprise, is the bearded fundamentalist. He kneels in the gangway, next to the poorly passenger. He presses a stethoscope to her chest.

"Sir? You said it was important?"

The doctor makes a joke. His patient looks better already.

"Sir?"

"Might I have a pair of ear-phones, please?"

"You're being very quiet," remarks Jean. "Back in our old school office, are we? Graham Nixon versus the Woes of the World?"

"I'm just enjoying the food. It's not half bad."

"Positively 'Lush', I should say."

"This sticky toffee pudding is as good as yours."

"Steady on, Graham Nixon. It's good to see you eating like a hog again; not just snoring like one."

"Yours hardly touched the sides, I notice."

My air hostess refills the famous comedian's glass, and is rewarded by a saucy wink. I am too embarrassed even to look at her.

Jean whispers, "That's his third."

"Three glasses of wine isn't so much."

"His third bottle, Graham. Comedians have a name for excess, mind. Remember what that taxi driver in Lyme Regis told us about the orgies in Benny Hill's mansion?"

"That was just local colour, to increase his tip. Where have the young lad and his mother got to, do you think?"

"Bumped up to first class, possibly. During your long-distance hike, an attendant came around, inviting other passengers to go and meet the captain. Quite a few have already taken up the offer."

"That must violate every protocol in the book."

"You know, I rather fancy a peek, myself. Will you be all right?"

"Yes: if you promise not to think about sitting in the driver's seat."

Jean smirks like a teenager and goes. To justify asking for the ear-phones, I plug myself into "In-Flight Radio", fearing an attack of Ooh-yeah-Baby music, or Thumpy-thumpy-thumpy music. But first up is the magnificent "Love on the Rocks" by Neil Diamond. Nobody can put over a tune like Diamond, except John Denver, who follows next! Dr White's new drugs over-stimulate the tear glands, I find. Around the line, Dark and dusky, painted on the sky, I have to dab my eyes on my napkin. That Ralph McTell follows on with "Streets of London" is a coincidence nearly as striking as the Montaigne essay. For Jean and I, this is what women call "Our Song". Might we have chosen these songs, off a menu of some sort, before boarding?

My eyes grow heavy, all of a sudden, and close themselves.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. Here is a pillow, fallen on my lap. Here is a blue line to divide Earth from Heaven. Here, it opens up. Here are frosted purples, waxy ambers and rearing cloud-heads. Here is an ache in my ribs, to capture this sunrise, and remember it, always. No, to be it.

"It's a matter of ... waiting for the right flamin' combination ... then the floodgates open." The famous comedian is addressing me, as he places his cards. There is nobody else: even the passengers I mistook for fundamentalists are gone. "But, unless I'm very much mistaken, it's all ... about to ... come ... clear ..." He smiles that famous smile and he nods at the seat next to him. "Clap your pork-pies on this. This doesn't happen very often ..."

It feels natural to accept his offer.

"Sitting comfortably? A-One!" As the famous comedian turns over the Jack of Clubs, his name comes back to me. Ronnie Barker! The one and only Ronnie Barker! He gives me his Wasn't-Born-Yesterday face, and I can almost hear an audience laugh, with me amongst them. "A-Two!" Ronnie Barker turns over the Queen of Clubs, and my memory reveals the living room in our house in Great Malvern. I am in my ratty armchair by the unlit hearth. The young policeman perches on the sofa, much jumpier than I. Jean was his first sudden death. It will be some hours yet before the fact that I am now a widower begins its awful transformation. In point of fact, the television is still on: Jean had Richard and Judy on when she went upstairs. Just popping to the loo. My last word to her was a grunt. Here is the television news. Comedian Ronnie Barker, star of Porridge and Open All Hours, and co-star of The Two Ronnies, died in hospital earlier today. The young policeman says, Oh no. I tell him how Jean, Ruth and I never missed an episode of The Two Ronnies.

"And," Ronnie Barker turns over the King of Clubs, "a-Three!"

"Jean was here!" I grip something. "She was here! On this aeroplane! She was just here!" Ronnie Barker does a Don't-Get-Your-Knickers-In-A-Twist face, and prises my fingers from his forearm. "Nobody's saying she wasn't, are they?"

We look at each other, and I understand. This has happened before. The ache of disappointment grows into pain. "I'm dreaming. I dreamed her, and I'm dreaming you."

That the Ronnie Barker knows my name is my dream's bizarrest touch so far, save its filmic lucidity. So bizarre, in point of fact, that a more ominous possibility has to be considered. "Mr Barker -"

"'Ronnie'. Only the taxman calls me 'Mr Barker'."

"Ronnie ... this is a strange thing to ask, but if you know the truth ... I'd rather hear it. Am I ... am I delusional?"

"I don't see any men in white coats. Does it feel like you're paddocked off on Fraggle Rock, eh?"

"I don't know what ... 'Fraggle Rock' feels like."

"What's that? And you a flamin' headmaster for twenty years!" Ronnie Barker gathers his cards. "Well, time to inspect the delusional cockpit. I'll tell your dreamt-up wife you'll be along by-and-by, but I'd hurry up, if I were you. Jean's a lovely lady, and pilots in uniform are very smooth talkers, and imaginary ones? Worst of all."

That I must follow where Ronnie Barker went, I know, but first I wish to finish Montaigne's essay. Towards its end, Montaigne imagines the voice of Nature. It is a matronly voice, one that brooks no ifs and buts, like a capable Domestic Science teacher I once hired, but compassionate, too. Chiron refused immortality, being informed of the conditions thereof by the god of time and duration himself, his father Saturn. Imagine, indeed, how much more grievous and insupportable everlasting life would be to man than the life I have given him. If you had not death you would eternally curse me for having deprived you of it. I have knowingly mingled a little bitterness with it, to prevent you, seeing the advantage of it, from embracing it too eagerly and too unwisely. To keep you in that middle state, which I require of you, where you neither fly life nor again fly death, I have tempered both one and the other between sweetness and bitterness. Well, Montaigne's truth is not absolute. Rebecca Piper flew life, aged sixteen, and most of us spend our life flying death, as best we can. What else are seatbelts and prunes and the NHS for? Yet, Montaigne still consoles me like no other. No truth is absolute, except maybe platitudes, and that is the problem with platitudes. Here is sublimity, where the oxygen grows thin. Here is the new day, uncrumpling itself into brilliance.

In the tiny galley at the front of the first-class cabin, my air hostess is immersed in her Joanna Trollope novel. "Fillet of smoked mackerel with fluffy scrambled eggs, Sir? Or I can do you ... let's see ... honeydew melon, a saucer of blueberries, or even a flute of champagne?"

"It's not just ... an uncanny resemblance, is it?"

"No, Sir," answers Rebecca Piper.

"That boy, Tom. He was Dad, wasn't he?"

She gestures at the captain's door. "Everyone's here."

"You must excuse me ... it's all ..."

"Mighty disorientating?"

"Mightily disorientating, yes." Rebecca Piper's navy Air Dénouement uniform is spotless, even after her night-shift. "You look good. I mean, you look well. I mean - you were the worst error of my professional life."

"I was an obstreperous, self-obsessed, neurotic horror, Sir."

"Eileen Lippetts telephoned me that morning - you remember her?"

"Kindnesses are the last thing we forget, Mr Nixon."

"Eileen said you'd swallowed the entire medicine cabinet."

"Even the cod liver oil pellets, and my back's never twinged since."

"Eileen said your mother's housekeeper found you, when she came to get you ready for school. The house was icy. You never woke up."

"The poor woman had the shock of her life."

"If only I'd listened to what you were telling me."

"Teenagers don't 'tell', Sir. They bellow, conceal, twist. Steal."

"You were," my voice fails me, " ... my job."

"Can you forgive the violence I inflicted on you?"

"Forgive?" I think I mishear. "There's nothing for me to forgive."

"Sir, do you forgive me?"

"But -" I look for another answer, but there isn't one. "Yes."

A day and a night pass, perhaps.

"Then I dissolve your right to carry on accusing yourself."

A day and a night pass, perhaps.

"Sir?" One of Rebecca Piper's hands touches my stringy old wrist. "Are you ready to meet the captain now, Sir?"